the past few days!

(So I wrote this post last night and it was being slow uploading the pictures so i gave up and went to bed)

'ello everyone!

It's been a fun few days since I posted! The day after we

got back from Bath, Salisbury Cathedral, and Stonehenge we once again had class in the morning. Then we came back to the hotel, did a little bit of writing for our critical responses and then headed over to the British Museum. That is one cool museum. We started in the Egyptian sculpture and architecture, did Greek sculpture, then went upstairs to the Egyptian mummies and stuff. I spent a lot of time in that area-it was really interesting I've not seen that kind of stuff since I was too young to really remember it well or understand all of the signs on the exhibits. The museum is absolutely beautiful, it is a roman style building that you step into what used to be the exterior but they closed in quite a while back (I described that really poorly-but I have pictures). One of the most amazing things about it is that it has been around for hundreds of years. The British are very devoted to their history. You can be walking around london and seeing more modern buildings, ones from the earlier 1900s, and then all of a sudden you come across this amazing building that's been there for hundreds of years. It is so eclectic but really paints a picture of the transformations that this country went through.

After the museum we headed to the national theater a few hours before our show and had an awesome tour of the entire facility. In England people go to the theater like we go to movies so the national theater has 3 theaters in it and they do their shows "in rep" so there are at least 2 shows rotating on each of the 3 stages at one time. It is absolutely enormous and I was absolutely in awe of the amount of planning and work that goes on in the theater and all of the amazing things they can do in that facility. We then saw a play called "Our Class" which was about a small town in Poland during WWII. It was absolutely heart wrenching, the show itself was absolutely terrific but it just hit everyone so hard and you got so emotionally connected to it that we left just depressed. It was the perfect storm of loving the show and hating the things that went on there. So worth the 3 hours we sat there.

The next day was pretty chill as far as what we did in between class and the play. We were finishing up our first round of critical responses we had to write so a lot of us stayed at the hotel for a few hours and did that, then went and did a little gift shopping at picadilly circus and grabbed lunch, came back did more homework, and then went to a weird play called "Money". It was in this old warehouse and was a 3 story set that they actually took the audience up into and we moved around the set with them. It was freaking weird...I wasn't really a fan. Oh well.

The next day we boarded our "coach" and drove to stratford, stopping in Oxford for an hour and a half on the way (so pretty). In Stratford-upon-avon we stayed in cute little bed and breakfasts and saw the play Arabian Nights which was an absolutely fantastic production and was just beautiful. It was really weird though because there were so many school groups that had to cancel that the theater was SO empty-we ended up moving to the first and second row and there were probably less than a hundred people for what would normally be a sold out show. But nonetheless it was great and I think it was our favorite show we've seen so far (it's just so fun and it was really well done).

Today we drove to York after seeing the Shakespeare houses and Anne Hathaway's Cottage this morning in Stratford and have just been taking a little down time. We had "family dinner" at an Indian restaurant and I think everyone was just ready to veg for the rest of the night.

Here are some pictures thus far!

Trafalger Square

Me petting the cavalry guard's horse, who looked really thrilled haha. But he was sweet he turned and looked at me like he dug the attention and wanted the guy with the weird costume off of his back

My friend Kelsey and I in front of the classic red London phone booth!